Tag Archives: actionscript

I spent the weekend working in Flash. I love Flash when I get to work with it consistently, but when it’s been awhile, it makes me a little crazy, and in this case it was Actionscript 2 that someone else had originally coded, so the crazy went to 11.

This time I was having trouble with a scrolling text box that contains a LOT of information. For some reason the bottom half of the content wasn’t showing up, even though the box continued to scroll that far. I think I spent half an hour trying to figure out why it was doing that until I stumbled on an accidental fix–toggling the “Selectable” box in the textbox properties. Voila! Problem fixed, if not necessarily solved.

It bothers me that I don’t know exactly why it was only hiding the bottom half of the box. I know it was about the size of the box, not the lines of content–when I reduced the line-height, more text showed up, but not all. I suspect it has to do with the function that created the scrollbar, but having to unravel all those mathy variables–especially when AS3 is my native Actionscript language, not 2–is a task I just can’t motivate myself to tackle, so I’m going with the mystery fix.

Flash has been my life lately, specifically learning Actionscript 3.0 from a class at Otis. Tomorrow is the last one, and I must say, I wasn’t sure at first that it was a good idea, but now, nine classes later, I’m glad I did it. I’ve learned a lot, not least of which is that a) I’m not stupid, and b) there is usually no magic recipe for my task and I just have to do it on my own.

Two important things I’ve learned that either took much googling, or wasn’t on google at all:

1) .text and .htmlText are two different things. The second one will insure that your text field renders in html. (Learned this from a colleague, as google gave me no joy.)

2) MouseEvent.ROLL_OUT and MouseEvent.MOUSE_OUT are also two different things, and this is very important: The former works on the parent movieclip, while the latter is more likely to work on whatever child object is contained within the movieclip (so!frustrating!).

I have put them here so I will always remember them, and hopefully to make them easier for others to find, should they need them.

Now it’s time to conquer the checkboxes nested in a drop-down menu. Yay?